ence and extravagance as the source of
the disease so deeply fixed upon him. But the farmer of to-day reads
and travels. A Dakota farmer, a few weeks since, visited the paternal
homestead in Ohio. He found, to his surprise, that his father's farm,
which fifteen years ago lay within three miles of a thriving town of
two thousand inhabitants, paying an annual tax of fifteen dollars, and
worth a hundred dollars an acre, now pays a tax of seventy-five
dollars, and is worth but forty-five dollars an acre, although the
neighboring town has increased its population to ten thousand, and is
noisy with shops and factories. He found that this was not an isolated
case, but a fair example of the depreciation of farm values. He was
not surprised to learn that the Ohio farmers were even then gathering
to organize a State alliance. A careful survey of the United States,
we are sure, will measurably confirm the conclusion of the western
farmer, that farming, except in those localities where it has taken on
the form of market gardening, or where it yet monopolizes some
specialty, is unprofitable and disappointing.

Most farmers are ready to admit that their surroundings are better and
their comforts more numerous than in ancestral days, when stoves were
unknown, and the women slaved over the hand-loom and spinning-wheel,
when medical men bungled and schools were luxuries; but they can see
with half an eye that the mighty material advances of the last half
century in this country have been made to serve the rich rather than
the poor, the strong instead of the weak. They do not object to
railroads, and the constantly increasing facilities for travel and
transportation; but they do object to laws and customs which make
railroads a means of transferring the hard earnings of the farm to the
coffers of money kings. The farmer has received comforts at the hands
of our civilization, but he has paid a good price for them, not to the
genius which created, but to the plutocrat who bought. It is not
because the farmer is facing starvation that he moves politically; but
because, in the midst of plenty, comparative poverty is his portion.
As a legitimate result of the civilization in the presence of which he
lives, his tastes have improved, and his desire for education and
comfortable living has increased, and with this improvement and
increase has come a widening of the distance betwixt his possessions
and his desires. In other words, the shadows of